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There is a simple reason for this: other than the signage the garbage bins are identical to every other fast food bin they've used in the past.

Signage is rarely read (especially in an environment over crowded with offers) as the consumer already knows how a bin works. You need to change the bin design to intuitively inform consumers that it has a different purpose to the one they are accustomed to.

While you'll always have asshats who don't care, changing the design and material leads the average person to change their behaviour. Look at this recycling bin it's card structure, green colour and different shape cue the user to realise that it has a special purpose, you're unlikely to pour in a big gulp of soda into something that clearly can't accommodate it. The same applies to compost

Then there is the humble waste paper basket, intuitively telling office workers not to dump wet refuse in it because it has no capacity to contain it.

tl;dr: users are accustomed to these bins being general purpose, you must change the bin design to suit the purpose or casual consumers won't notice the extra instructions.

My college messes this up because they have 3 bins right next to each other. The only difference is the label on the side... and on the hinged top. The problem is the hinged tops get switched around a lot, and then what do you do? Do you put your soda in the paper recycling bin with the soda recycling top, or the plastic recycling bin with the trash top? People fuck it up about half the time because the lids get switched around.

Well, technically as soon as he made it, it was taken, as the point at which it was taken was indeed in the past at any arbitrary point afterwards. One could argue that it held true for all points of its lifespan, as the point of inception is an infinitely small point, so during any concrete measurement some finite period must have elapsed since its creation, implying its veracity.

Alternatley, if we assume that a username is reserved for at least a similar span of time before the creation of an account, perhaps in order to prevent the creation of two accounts with the same name at the exact same time, then the moment of inception can be treated however desired.

Well, it does take a bit of learning. E.g. is a bone compostable? I know the answer, but I can see how a lot of people wouldn't. (Btw, we usually get PhDs in things like computer science. I've never heard of a PhD in technology as a degree.)

Which is why BK's campaign is weird. A place that doesn't serve much compostable food seems like an odd choice for a composting campaign. But as someone said later in this thread, it makes them look good, so I suppose they don't care

That also frequently includes the institutions themselves in my experience.

By putting these bins in place BK earns brownie points, can advertise a certain way, may even get tax exemptions. They don't really care if people fail to use them. They could even be just sorting some compostable foods to send away and mixing the rest of the crap up since they know the public are spoiling it.

It's not really that big a deal. The bottom line is that they enrolled in a recycling program, but everyone sucks at recycling. To make you feel good, they give you two bins, but everyone fucks it up, so they merge them all together, making it only 10-20% worse. They need to sort it anyway.

You simply can not trust normal people to sort their trash 100%. As long as you need more than 0 sorting, you might as well sort it all. Although partial sorting may be a cost saver, it's not necessarily a requirement. Separate bins is basically a potential optimization, which generally fails to produce any optimized results.

Same case with my school also. Except they recently made a push to replace all of the plastic recycle bins so that only Plastic bottles could fit the slot, and attempting to put anything else in would be a waste of effort. It seems that elegant solutions force people to comply without realizing it.

I worked at a grocery store in high school and by the bottle return there were bins labeled "paper" and "plastic" for the bags they brought the bottles in. No one respected it and we had to manually sort it out. It was a pain.

I went to a TEDx event recently and all they had compostable plastic cups and stuff like that for lunch. These people should be smarter than your average Americans. They had 2 or 3 people at every trash area to help people sort out how to throw away their lunch items. I'm not sure how essential it was, but the process was not fast.

It is absolutely NOT confusing for the average American. The problem is that way too many Americans are freaking assholes. Who are these businesses trying to fool? Recycle? Compost? I LOVE the idea. I think it is amazing and would go TO these businesses rather than others because they do it...BUT...we are talking about a population of people who feel absolutely NO compunction about shitting and pissing all over a public bathroom and then smearing the waste onto the walls. In PUBLIC. In broad daylight. The people who mess this up are THOSE people. The ones who drop entire rolls of toilet tissue into toilets at the mall and then flush...AFTER they have managed to take a 3-week's supply of dumps all at one time.

In my college city everybody recycles everywhere. Except in places that have those tray bin things. It's just too easy to put everything on a tray and just shove it in, rather then sorting everything on two separate trays and having to push that lid multiple times.

I worked food service at a conference center one summer. Every Thursday we had a salmon bake outside, and we had a recycling bin with a tiny little hole through which to put water bottles next to a gaping open trash can, as well as signs explaining which was which. Even with me there telling people which to put stuff in, they'd still put most things in the trash, and occasionally would stuff their paper plates into the tiny hole in the plastic bottle bin.

If this is in San Francisco dividing trash like this is required by law. I'm not sure if it applies to individual households but I know all businesses and apartment complexes are obligated to participate.

All the stuff that goes in the blue recycling bin is sorted at a huge facility. They use magnets to remove metal objects and some type of blower to remove lighter plastics. The rest is sorted by hand. Even though plastic bags are recyclable they're supposed to go in the trash because they get stuck in the conveyer belts at the sorting facility.

Wait, so your saying "Well done, Burger King" to the fact that its following the laws of your town so it can operate its business? Go outside SF and go to a Burger King and it is not like this. I just went there tonight in fact, and there is only one for trash.

It would be nice if there was a standardized recycling labeling system.

The one that gets me most is places like Whole Foods who make so much stuff out of plants that it's really unclear what's recycle and what's compost anymore... some of those places even have it broken down more by paper, plastic, glass, compost, trash... It's like a friggin puzzle every time I am done with lunch and I am never sure I got it right.

Make a color code deal, Plastic is red, glass is blue, compost is green and trash is black. Every container has to have a sticker of that color on it and that's where it goes when you are done.

For example, for a box of crackers, there will be a paper recycling logo with the kanji for paper on it along with specifically what in the package is to be recycled as paper (the other box, the inner lining, or something like that). There will be another plastic recycling logo under that that lists all of the recyclable plastic components of the package. The have this on almost everything; the stuff that doesn't have any logo goes into either burnable/non-burnable garbage.

I don't understand why we can't have this system in the US. If the EPA forces the manufacturing industry to just PRINT what is recyclable in what ways on each package, it would make recycling a lot easier.

... and Sweden. I can't imagine why Americans are having such problem putting straws and plastic lids in a separate container. Children can do it. Heck, you could train animals to do it. I don't think you even need a particularly smart animal like a chimpanzee. A dog could probably be trained to do it. Maybe even some birds.

My girlfriend worked at a fast food joint for a bit. Now and then she volunteered to do the bottle recycling and voluntold me to help. Pretty much every bag was 45% bottles, 45% old nasty food, 10% sticky mystery muck at the bottom. If half the people can't differentiate between the labeled "GARBAGE" flap, and the labeled "BOTTLES" hole on top of the counter, I'd hate to see what those cans look like.

My college food court had elaborately separate bins for the same reasons. However, it turned out that the unionized janitors did not have "contractual" agreement for such things, and as a result, everything just went into the same dump truck.

Complex recycle chart in Japan. They are required to separate plastics (i.e. PET vs PP); though of course most of the materials have LARGE and simple markings on them to help out consumers. Anyways, the point is that in the US, the public is pretty stubborn and ignorant, but I find that there really is no coordination occurring at a societal level either. It's not the "government's" job to enforce these rules; instead, it would be nice and prudent for business and organizations to coordinate these things autonomously....BUT WHERE'S THE PROFIT IN THAT?!! ugg..

You know, people often bitch about customers who dont bus their own tray/trash in fast food restaurants..... well this is going to add to the problem. People are now going to be more likely to leave their tray at the table or just dump all the trash in either trash can.

The separated garbage is advertising, stupid! Most businesses have no intention of doing that extra work. Go look out back of the establishment and tell me how many dumpsters you see. Jesus Christ after a couple decades of life or more I would think you would catch onto that by now.

How about using less disposable packaging in the first place? There's no need to place my burger and my chips in separate containers and then place them inside a bag when I'm going to sit down and eat them in your "restaurant".

Wouldn't it be great if someone invented some kind of reusable "plate" where you could place the food for me to eat off, that could then simply be washed and given to another customer?

TL;DR: Germany has institutionalized and incentivized recycling and it appears to be working quite well. A similar approach would be viable on the city/state level if beverage bottle manufacturers and bottlers got on board with a solid deposit system.

This may be somewhat of a moot point, but Germany is highly steeped in recycling. I have one small trashcan that I share with four other families that is for "restmüll", or all the trash we make that isn't recyclable. That can is picked up every other week. Depending on where you live in the country, you may have glass pick-up, which requires separating glass that does not have a deposit on it. Then, you have kitchen paper and plastics of all sorts. In my neighborhood, we take our non-deposit glass to a central point in the city and put it in large bins.

My favorite part about the whole system over here is that a LOT of the bottles that you buy drinks in (beer, water, juice) come with a hefty deposit, somewhere between €0,08 and €0,50. Bottles are usually priced in bulk, so buying one bottle of beer may cost you €1,00, but buying them in a 10- or 20-piece crate brings it down to €0,80 (example numbers). When you're done, you take the crate and bottles back to the store where you got them (or any store on the same 'pfand' or deposit system) and feed them into a machine that spins them around, scans the barcode, and racks up a total. Most of the machines have a large bay in the bottom and a belt that you can put a crate on and it takes it back whole-kit. Push a button, and it gives a coupon for store credit.

My office coffee club buys still water 6L at a time (the water in our building tastes horrible), and after our initial €0,25 deposit on each bottle, we're only paying €0,18 per litre, which is a lot cheaper than having water delivered.

I do know that soda and beer companies reuse the bottles extensively, as quite often you'll buy beer or soda that is in a bottle that has a worn ring around the top and bottom where it has ground against other bottles in a filling line. Thinner plastic bottles (think water bottles) are mulched when you return them and shipped to companies to be recast.

I'm not sure about the rest of it all, the paper and the kitchen plastics and wine bottles. But it's a very clean country and it really helps ease the "burden" of being a conscious consumer. I get to enjoy things like apfelschorle and fine German beers and not have the same pang of guilt that I had in the states when that bottle was inevitably destined for a land-fill.

I saw this episode of P&T years ago and it's stuck in the back of my mind. However, it seems like the German system has really got it figured out. Their point about sorting things correctly is a good one; it can be daunting learning where everything is supposed to go. But they've institutionalized and incentivized large sections of the consumer-leg of recycling and it appears to work.

The real trick here would be to implement this kind of system city by city, state by state in the U.S. I know San Francisco has a very similar system in the works, including collecting compost and using that for mulch and potting soil in their city parks.

In Berlin people leave bottles on the street to let other people collect them. If you collect 100 beer bottles you get 0.08x100 = 8 euros :) But if you find PLASTIC bottles you get much more money - hence it's hard to find plastic bottles since they pay you 0.2~0.5 euros each.

In the parks, on the train, on the streets, many people look for pfand, keep places clean and make money. It helps also homeless people. :)

25ct. The PET bottles are a big money making scheme for the grocery chains. Just 10-20 years ago almost all sparkling water was sold in heavy multi-use glass bottles in crates, which due to more demanding logistics made one bottle of water seem more valuable and for more special occasions (mineral water vs. carbonated tap water). Today it’s all cheap PET.

The multi-use bottles were recirculated 42 times on average for mineral water, making packaging cost per bottle 5ct. They almost completely disappeared, it’s a shame.

Dependent on what you're recycling, how it's being done and the processes involved, there is lots of data showing the benefits of recycling. I am however not well aware of any such material in English. :-(

But, it's also worth asking what the relative costs of new and recycled products would be if the cost of the existing infrastructure was taken into consideration, as well as the environmental impact. A last thing to take into account is physical space (and again, the impact) of landfills. Certainly, some places still have space for such things, other places do not.

Penn and Teller have an ideology. As they say, they're biased as fuck. They often have good points, but also often have a very selective view of their points. The College episode was a classic in that regard. No, you don't need higher education to succeed in life, even if you're much more likely to do so with more education. But there are a lot of things you can't do without higher education. In the interest of balance, did they mention anything of this? Not really, as they say, it wouldn't make a good show if they did.

The best one in that regard was the one on old people. It was like a Mythbusters episode where Adam and Jamie got high first and forgot what a scientific process even looked like and were paid by old farts to say that old farts didn't suck with logic so embarrassing it wouldn't be seen on a Fox opinion show.

It's BAD for the environment and planet (and YOUR tax dollars) to recycle anything except aluminum. In those regards, Penn and Teller are dead on.

There is no issue with landfill space. Never was. Never will be.

All of the data showing the "benefits of recycling" are prepared by people who make money recycling. It's just as biased and disingenuous as the oil companies paying for studies trying to disprove global climate change.

Yeah, so I just watched this video. It's entertainment and it's an opinion piece, dripping with contempt for environmentalists and incredibly one-sided. This is in no way a valid source for evaluating the efficacy of recycling. It's a somewhat researched editorial with a lot of Fucks in it.

Sorry, I just started working in fast food, everything in the blue box gets dumped in the garbage and thrown in the dumpster.... I was told that's how McDonalds does it as well... sorry to make you lose hope in the world...

I work at an environmental center called Shaver's Creek, and we got rid of our trash dumpster a few months ago. It's truly amazing how much can be composted or recycled, and kids these days are starting to become more acclimated to the idea of composting. Hopefully, within the next decade, grown adults become less annoyed with doing a few seconds' worth of sorting and this concept grows in popularity. We certainly have seen positive encouragement from across the board.